Sometimes, you just got to tell like it is. No matter who it may hurt, who it may offend. The truth makes no apologies. Will y'all pray with me tonight. I got something boiling up inside and I just got to let it out. Amen? Lawd, lawd.. My god. I won't be long, but I got to let it out.

Now... if you will.... (wiping my face with my hankerchief), get out your Bibles and turn with me to the Book of Maafa, chapter Middle Passage - years 1505 through 1859. Amen? And it reads....

"The trauma our people had to endure began when our mothers and fathers were torn from their kinship groups via war, kidnapping and deceit. Whatever the pretense, a great disservice was done to acquire them. From there more wrong was heaped on those first peoples' shoulders as they were subjected to dehumanizing conditions of bondage, lying in each other's excrements, placed in predicaments that allow the ships' vermin to feast on their bodies and forced to witness cool blooded murders and mercy suicides. The men and the women were violated by the sick perversions of the ships' crew. Women forcibly penetrated and the men forcibly sodomized. Loved ones to frail to survive the Middle Passage's third month horror trip tossed over to become bonemeal for trailing hammerheads, mako and great whites. That first generation of "slaves" in our families endured the living hell of ghoulish sub-humans.

Life becomes a meaningless pit of torture, misfortune, tragedy and, most importantly, uncertainty."

Can you imagine if this happened to you? Torn from your family and given to some strange people.

And it says, I repeat, "Life becomes a meaningless pit of torture, misfortune, tragedy and, most importantly, uncertainty."

Most importantly, uncertainty. People are social animals. We like the interaction we have with each other. We need it, that is what makes us people. One of the main things, we derive from these relationships, if their healthy, is stability, certainty. We need stability. We need to know when we come home from school, work or where ever, that our loved ones are going to there. That's why when someone dies, it's hard on us. Because we are in a time of uncertainty. You say, "Well, where are you going with this, Brother Blackbird?" When someone dies, guess what you have just experienced? A loss. Well, yes. You have just experienced trauma. Amen?

Trauma as an event is a situation that causes great distress or disruption. So when we experience a loss that had an emotional connection, the event is traumatic. Trauma, itself, is an emotional wound that creates substantial lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis.

Hmmm. So a traumatic event, such as slavery, can bring about trauma in the individual which in term stifles the psychological development of the trauma victim.

So we have established the first people experienced a traumatic event, that in its breadth and intensity, created a traumatized condition for those that endured it. Let's move forward.

As we continue, in the Middle Passage chapter, we see where the people were eventually taken off the ships, paraded in front of slave buyers. Each one of them, man, woman and child were all inspected like horses from the top of their crown to bottom of their feet. Can you imagine, someone with know right to touch you and whom you gave no permission to, putting their filthy hands all in your mouth, around your eyes, on your breast and gentialia. They even examined their rectal area. Every inch of their body was examined.

This happened to your foreparents, your people. How dehumanizing was that? Here was a situation where you would want to escape. Let's make it real. Amen?

Let's continue, sisters and brothers. Our people, that first generation experienced an untold suffering - trauma if you will.

Now let's fast forward to Chapter Pre-Antebellum, years 1619-1860. The American wasteland birthed at least 2 to 10 generations of Black folks who knew nothing but captivity. Nothing but to rise early to toil in the blistering sun, planting, germinating and harvesting rolls of cotton crop, tobacco crop, indigo crop, rice crop and corn crop. The average life expectancy for a Black man or woman during slavery was 21 - 22 years of age. Half of Black babies born during slavery died within their first year of life. Death was a common thing for Black folks. That's why many songs were either about escaping to freedom or dieing and going to heaven. Sweet low, sweet chariot.

And sometimes, I feel like a motherless child.... Another big thing that occurred during slavery was "breeding." Once the British ships began to intercept slavers around Sierra Leone before they could make out onto the Atlantic, there was a decrease in the supply of "freshwater" slaves, newly from the Motherland. So to counteract this trend, some white men found it profitable to switch from being primarily agricultural tyrants to purveyors of human flesh from the most "natural act." One white man, circa 1830's, bragged that he doesn't even need to plants crops anymore because he makes more money creating Black babies. They get the "Mandingo", the big strong Black man, and mate him with all the fit Black women on the plantation or from neighboring plantations. On some plantations, it became where all the slave children were siblings because they had the same "daddy." According to one memoir, a mother was once breeded to her son. The story was her son was taken away shortly after birth and sent to another plantation. He was raised by another woman as her son. He grew up to be strong and of "good stock" and his mother still a strong Black woman, of decent childbearing age, was selected to produce more slaves. Evidently, he got some of his good genes from his mother. It was arranged for them to mate. He was brought in from another plantation. After they copulated, basking in the glow of "you know what", mother inquired about the scar he had on his forehead. He told her the story about how when he was a baby he fell from his mother's arms and received the scar. Soon, afterwards, he was taken away. Mother looked deeper and recognized her son.

Imagine the trauma of being six or seven years old and being stripped from your mother's love and thrown somewhere foreign among other Black folks like you but not related to you by blood. Imagine how you might be treated by people who were undergoing severe stress themselves day in day out - fearing their own lives and now having to look after you a stranger. Sure, solidarity would eventually seep in as we all shared the same fortune and were in the same boat, but I'm sure those relationships were not always loving, affectionate, nurturing and healthy.

As we think about those relationships that our people had to endure, we can probably see them all in Black life today. Of course, everything wasn't gloom and gruelsome for the Black family life; but we want to focus on the potential situations living a life of powerlessness, fear and horror can create. We got to tell the truth and shame the devil.

I wonder how relationships were abusive, dysfunctional and imbalanced, on average, for Black people?

Time does not allow me the luxury to ponder and/or address everything here. I want to get this message out. We could continue for each major time period of Black life in America, but I'm sure you get the picture. Now I want to focus on a few things here.

1. Life expectancy of the slave
2. Removal of families from loved ones and vice versa
3. Surrogate families
4. Stress of everyday life
5. Sexual and physical exploitation

Are you all seeing the similiarities I'm seeing?

Here's the one thing about slave life - many of those female slaves had children at young ages.

The death-rate amongst slaves was high. To replace their losses, plantation owners encouraged the slaves to have children. Child-bearing started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbreeding.htm

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Young women were often advertised for sale as "good breeding stock". To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbreeding.htm

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The patterns of African enforced migrations and settlement were basic to the development of the slave family and society. In a world where African men outnumbered African women, not surprisingly, slave reproduction was low. Understandably, too, those women took to the Americas the cultural habits of their homelands; in this case, most importantly, prolonged breast-feeding habits which inhibited conception. That, coupled with high infant mortality among African slave women, ensured a very low rate of slave reproduction. Where imported Africans dominated a local slave society, slave women simply did not give birth to the numbers of children necessary to maintain, still less to increase, the local slave population. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USASbreeding.htm

This makes me think of the slaves who came here and built a "Wall" street and they sold us from the corner. Now we worship to tieths we have to pay in order to be ncluded wth the "gone public" facilites which are reaping on our hard work. Like a dealer taking a chance in turning over some money. Like liquor it's legal though cause they said so.

From the get-go, Americans were profiteers, and plundering the New World was backbreaking work. Writing in 1645 to John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his brother-in-law Emanuel Downing complained, “I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.” Further south, in New Amsterdam, slaves built Wall Street’s wall and cleared what became Harlem and Route 1. When a new shipload of slaves proved insufficiently hardy, Director General Peter Stuyvesant expressed his displeasure to the Dutch West West India Company, insisting that the company supply the best slaves to Christian and company enterprises, while unloading the feeble on “Spaniards and unbelieving Jews.”

This is not to assert that ordinary Americans were “evil,” but rather that our insistent sorting of the world into “good guys” and “evildoers” distorts reality. Today, progressives are justly suspicious of the high-flown “freedom” rhetoric our government deploys to advance American empire. But we need always to be skeptical of reductive, righteous narratives. Far from promoting morality, such fictions allow us to hide our worst impulses from ourselves.http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2457/the_northern_slave_trade/